Previously on Beyond the Boundary:

The Calm had escalated and awakened Akihito’s youmu side. Faced with no other option, Izumi tells Mirai that she has to kill Akihito. Mirai encounters Akihito in the woods and the two have their fateful battle, and it is also revealed that Beyond the Boundary youmu is the one inside Akihito. Spoilers Ahead!

Akihito awakes in his aprtment, his youmu form once again dormant. He sees Mirai in his room and learns that she has been taking care of him the entire time. As the two visit their friends, Akihito notices that things aren’t like they seem and Mirai tells him about how she ended up Nagatsuki City in the first place.

The story fast forwards about a month or so after Mirai & Akihito’s fight, but most of the episode is a flashback with explanations on certain events in earlier episodes.

Akihito awakens at home to find Mirai taking care of him, after some slight misunderstandings and Mirai wasting all of Akihito’s eggs trying to cook the two go visit Mitsuki at the pool. We get a tense moment here when she tells Akihito that she is tired of him losing control of himself and that she won’t go through it again which he apologizes for. Although things start to crumble when Mirai takes Akihito to the literary club room.

It’s empty, and that’s not the only surprise. As Akihito notices the clouds shifting outside Mirai tells him the truth, he is still in a coma and what he is experiencing is just a delusion. Mirai is there because of a portion of her blood resides inside Akihito after she absorbed the Beyond the Boundary. She bids him goodby before he awakens, but not before telling him how she ended up in Nagatsuki City.

The episode then shifts to 6 months earlier and shows Mirai being contacted by Izumi and heading towards Nagasuki City. We learn Mirai’s real reason for coming to the city as Izumi tells her of Akihito and the Beyond the Boundary, telling her to destroy him before the Society of Spirit Warriors get to him first. Obviously Mirai fails when she gets closer to Akihito and we find out what happened when Mirai encounters Izumi at the end of episode 5. Mirai tells Izumi she can’t kill Akihito and that she will find another way to destroy the youmu inside him. This is where Izumi’s plans start to take shape.

The technique she used on Akihito during the Calm put his human self inside of a barrier and allowed Beyond the Boundary to take control. She then manipulated Mirai by telling her that her blood can kill the monster without killing Akihito, but she would lose her own life; which she accpets. Back in the present Akihito awakens from his coma and Mirai finds herself in a white mirror world as she heads toward Beyond the Boundary’s core.

Beyond the Boundary

“White World” is a nice episode that begins us down the road to this arc’s and possibly the series conclusion. We shine a light on Mirai’s past as well as get quite a few emotional moments between our leads. There is little to no action, but it’s no necessary as the dramatic pace sits just fine.

4/5